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I asked a young high schooler whether he was glad when school was out.
To my surprise, he replied, "Naw, I'll be glad when it starts again. It's too boring when you're off in the summer."
In MY day, that would have been heresy. We can all look back at some wonderful times in our lives, but I think when I was a kid the most magic time of all was summer vacation.
In those days, the last day of school came earlier than it does now, usually just before Memorial Day, which at that time was May 30, no matter on what day of the week that fell.
The last day was always a short day, only lasting until after lunch. When that final bell rang, we would say goodbye to our teachers (who somehow looked a lot older than they had in the fall) and, laden with papers and other take-homes, scramble for the bus to the tune of "School's out, school's out, teacher let the bulls out!"
Then, with the exception of a week of Bible school, a whole summer stretched before us, to be filled with good ol' outdoor fun. We didn't have the benefits of organized sports; there was no such thing as youth soccer or sports camps, and Little League seemed to be only for the town kids, we ridge runners soon learned after a season or two as benchwarmers.
Summer days seemed to be a lot longer then than they are now. We could fit three or four major adventures (which is really just a fancy name for near-disasters) into a day. Now it takes me most of a day just to mow the lawn.
If a river ran through Norman Maclean's childhood, a creek ran through mine -- Beaver Creek, to be specific. No kid ever had a better place to grow up.
That little limestone stream was like another home to me and my best friend and constant companion, Johnny. We were in it from the day after school was out until the day before it started again. There were two islands where the stream split. One, named Turtle Island due to the fact that there was generally a wood turtle or two to be found on it, was directly across from my house. The other, Moose Island, which got its name from an island in a comic book, was upstream a hundred yards.
These were accessible through a series of stepping stones. In the 1950s, although the polio epidemic had pretty much run its course, many mothers still worried that their kids would wind up in braces, iron lungs, or worse. My mom firmly believed that there were two main causes of polio: (1) eating unwashed fruit and (2) getting your feet wet in the creek.
If I had a nickel for every time I heard, "Now, don't get your feet wet, or you'll get polio," when I started out on an adventure, I would be rich right now. And if getting one's feet wet in the creek resulted in polio, I'd be in an iron lung.
Beaver Creek was a good place to fish. My dad was pretty hard on the trout population, although there were always a couple holdovers in some of the special holes. However, there were more than trout to be caught. In those days, white suckers were nothing short of a game fish. A special catch was a "redfin," which was the local name for the shortnose redhorse sucker (Moxostoma macrolepidotum) -- a species that I haven't seen in decades.
Redfins never got as big as some of the lunker white suckers that used to remain in the holes in Beaver Creek following the spring spawning run. However, they weren't nearly so bony and the flesh was particularly sweet.
There were also big chubs to be caught too. These were never eaten, except by one city cousin who had us rolling on the ground laughing when he took home a stringer of "horned trout."
Not all our fishing was done by conventional means. I guess the statute of limitations has run out on our crimes, so I can confess that some of our best fish were caught by hand. We knew the best undercut banks and willow root caves that held fish, and by stealthily reaching underneath and gingerly inserting a finger under the gill covers, one could often come up with a huge sucker and an occasional trout. Today I'm ashamed to admit it, but one of my biggest trout ever, a 26-inch brown, never had a hook in it.
The infrequent feel of a saw-toothed carapace rear that denoted snapping turtle or the laying of hands on an irritable water snake just added spice to the experience. I was once told that neither turtle nor snake would bite a hand underwater, and by golly, neither I nor anyone I ever knew was ever bitten, probably out of sheer speed born of terror at the mere touch of these menaces.
We also hunted frogs, snakes, salamanders, and turtles along the banks. I kept all these critters in a large plastic swimming pool. Often I would raise the frogs from tadpoles, watching them grow legs and lose their tails.
Water snakes were pet material unless they were big enough for their markings to fade. Then they were targets for BB guns. Back then we killed them, first because "they eat fish," and second because a sporting goods store in Saxton would reportedly give a box of .22 shells for every 10 snake tails. My cousin from down there always took my snake tails with him back to Saxton with the promise to share the .22 shells with me. You know, I'm still waiting for my share.
Ah, BB guns. We shot them by the hour. A weekly trip to Everett with my parents when they went grocery shopping always involved a walk to Swindells' for a 25-cent pack of 500 BBs -- a weeks' supply if I was careful.
Dad hung a piece of metal conduit from a wire for a target that gave a satisfying "ping!" when hit. After sighting and hitting it became old hat, we would shoot from our hips, left-handed, with the gun upside down, and, inspired by Davy Crockett, backwards using a mirror. I really believe I'm the shooter I am today because of countless hours of practice with my ol' Daisy.
Summer involved hunting with our air rifles too. Dad had a pet fox, and part of my summer chores involved supplying him with fresh meat in the form of sparrows and chipmunks that I would harvest with my BB gun. Now keep in mind that this was a different time with a different attitude. Chippies were unprotected animals with no closed season. Likewise, sparrows were not only unprotected but were thought of as pests.
Unfortunately, any little brown bird to me was a sparrow, so about the only species that didn't fall to my marksmanship were the very recognizable ones -- robins, goldfinches, catbirds, etc. Again, I take no pride in this, but as I said: this was a different time and they were shot for fox food.
Pigeons were also hunted, with a zeal that makes the Hegins folks look like pikers. BB guns could be shot in a barn if you were careful not to hit the metal roof. Now it took a head shot to kill a pigeon, and in the dim light of a barn, this was quite a trick.
Pigeons never went to waste either. If we killed enough, somebody's mother would take them for a pigeon potpie. If we only got a couple, we'd cook them ourselves down at our campsite.
Actually, our campsite was originally a stopping off place for hoboes, some of which were still around when I was a kid. They had cached some old pots and pans near a spring about a quarter mile downstream from my house. They also had a stone fire ring with an old refrigerator grate. Here we cooked our hand-caught fish, groundhog, pigeons, and other wild food, along with sweet corn and potatoes pilfered from neighborhood gardens, in season.
As with all things, these too passed. The 1950s ended, and life became more complicated. At the age of 12, I traded my BB gun for a .22, and killing groundhogs became my passion. One summer I made it my goal to kill one every day, and I made it into July before breaking my streak.
The year I turned 12 the idyllic days of my youth ended with the dawning of the 1960s. Johnny moved away, and I began helping make hay on the neighbors' farms, so I no longer had day after day of doing what I wanted. In those days, however, there were generally only two cuttings of hay per season, plus straw in August, so there was still plenty of summer to spend afield.
They say that our sense of smell has the strongest memory. Today I can't smell new-mown hay without thinking of those happy summer days of my youth.
Today as a retiree, summer vacation doesn't mean nearly as much to me. However, I feel sorry for any kid who is so bored for lack of anything to do that he wishes school were still in session.